Queen Elizabeth II's death in September 2022 prompted a predictable saturation of representations across all UK media. A lot of ‘traditional’ media, like the BBC, largely assumed, and hence attempted ...to reproduce, a hegemonic and unified response of national mourning. But some social media representations exposed a struggle over meaning, displaying ambivalence or even outright negativity towards the British monarchy and ‘national’ mourning practices. This article uses #MournHub and @GrieveWatch as two critical case studies to explore the complex meanings of the Queen's death across different communities and spaces. Doing so, this article illuminates the ambivalences of ‘national’ mourning, the intersectionality of class, race and national identity in shaping the tenor of people's responses to the Queen's death, the commercialisation and corporatisation of memorialising death and nationhood, the changing forms of royal mediations, and the careful staging of royal events.
The recent art installations by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei have attracted a lot of attention. Consisting primarily of thousands of life jackets worn by refugees arriving in Europe after a dangerous ...voyage crossing the Mediterranean Sea, Weiwei’s art installations have drawn focus on the deaths and disappearances of thousands of refugees. This paper discusses the symbolism of the life jacket, both seen as a fatal anchor and a life preserver. Analysing the art piece Soleil Levant, I will argue that Weiwei’s art is a work of mourning and is offering a temporary space in the contemporary city for negotiating the complexities and ambivalences of mourning and the impossible task of keeping the dead alive. As a symbol hovering between life and death, the life jacket is thus an emblematic illustration of mourning.
“These tombs with their statues that show off, embrace each other, collapsing into wailing and weeping.” The French historian Philippe Ariès had wandered around the European 19th century cemeteries ...and what he discovered were “baroque extravagances” in statues with mourning figures. The phenomenon primarily concerned the French, Italian and German cemeteries and in this way they differed from North American, English and Northwest European ones. But what do cemeteries in the Protestant Nordic countries look like? The author of the article has studied Swedish cemetery tomb sculpture, its background and messages. Who sculpted and commissioned them, and how is grief portrayed?The article addresses the Swedish tomb sculptures expressing grief. Not only flawless female bodies mourn at the tombs but also muscular and perfect male bodies as well. At the tombs, both women and men collapse, writhe, clasp their heads and/or sit with their shoulders lowered and their heads bowed. Their eyes do not meet the visitors: the grief is confined to the figures. The faces that mourn in Swedish cemeteries are averted, neutrally calm, contemplative with downcast or closed eyes. The tomb sculptures reflect the contemporary perception of death. The earlier centuries’ skeletons and praying tombholders inside the churches, with their emphasis on a Christian afterlife, were replaced by secular mourning figures. The tomb sculptures were commissioned by bourgeois families, who possessed financial as well as cultural capital.
In Penelope Lively’s The Photograph, the protagonist, Glyn, discovers an old photograph which proves that his late wife Kath committed adultery years before she killed herself. As Kath becomes the ...accused party, Lively both exploits and subverts the formulaic structure of a Sherlock Holmes crime-solving adventure for her novel’s inquiry into an uncertain past. However, the reviving of the detective story genre, taken out of its 19th-century context, seems to take a metaphorical and elegiac turn. While the investigation is off to a reason-oriented start, the characters gradually come to a posthumous empathetic understanding of Kath which also resurrects her ghost and memory. As the investigation appears to mirror a process of delayed mourning, the revival of the detective-story form thus leads to a return to life and ethical (re)birth for its grieving characters, which offers the prospect of elucidating the mystery behind Kath’s life and suicide.
Iraq and the maladies of archives Farhan, Sara
Journal of contemporary Iraq & the Arab world (Online),
06/2022, Volume:
16, Issue:
1-2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In 2017, Ru'ay Mu'ayjal's doctoral thesis 'Poetic composition in Basra in contemporary Iraqi History, 1990-2010', defended at Baghdad University's department of humanities demonstrated the stylistic ...and allegorical continuities and evolution of verse and versing of poetry in Basra. The work high-lighted how language of mourning, resistance, and political critique embodied creative word play that, when interpreted and analysed carefully, shed light on the complex intertextual modes of literary opposition in contemporary Iraq's cultural history (Mu'ayjal 2017). Similarly, in 2017, Rafid Al-Jadiri defended his doctoral thesis, 'The Shi'i historical novel: An analytical study of source material', at Baghdad University's department of Islamic History. Al-Jadin's work addresses 'academia's limited and perhaps neglectful scope when it comes to some Shi'i authors who left behind novels that offer us an important historical lens ... and gesture towards the richness and complexity of source material available to scholars' (Al-Jadiri 2017: ix). The intervention demonstrated how the Shi'i novel is in itself a historiographical positioning that draws on and from pervious sources, writing styles, and research methodologies; thus offering a quilted palimpset with layered meanings and interpretations. These creative approaches were driven by, in the worlds of Al-Jadiri 'the difficulties of accessing sources which is compounded with ... lost or destroyed priceless material ... while some surviving remain in shambles or are incomplete' (Al-Jadiri 2017: ix). While the Iraqi National Library and ...
The typical highlight of Filipino mourning of conducting funerals and burials has ceased due to recent health guidelines which required the deceased, who tested positive for the virus, to be cremated ...and buried right away to avoid further spread of the disease – making bereavement more complicated. This paper investigates the experiences of bereaved Filipino families who lost their loved ones to COVID-19 through a qualitative research design. Researchers explored the experiences of at least three (3) COVID-19 bereaved families through a descriptive phenomenological approach and analyzed the data using thematic analysis to extract the bereavement process experienced by the participants. The findings of the study highlight the changes to the Filipino funeral practice caused by the pandemic and the major roles of connectedness, and cultural and religious beliefs in the Filipino bereavement experience.
Cet article examine les propositions de R. Kurzweil à l’aune de son propre parcours. Il s’agit de démontrer que ces conceptions peuvent éclairer d’un nouveau jour les propos freudiens visant à ...distinguer le deuil de la mélancolie. Le fondateur de l’université de la Singularité, financée notamment par l’entreprise Google, fait régulièrement des déclarations spectaculaires sur l’avancée disruptive toute prochaine des progrès technologiques. Si la plupart des experts s’accordent sur le caractère hautement spéculatif de ses assertions, malgré tout l’idéologie transhumaniste infiltre le discours courant et témoigne d’une nouvelle actualité des problématiques eschatologiques. Nous interrogeons le discours transhumaniste au travers du prisme de la parole de R. Kurzweil en soulignant que sa conception de la finitude humaine (son souhait formulé de vaincre la mort) lui advient à la suite du décès de son propre père. Kurzweil indique également que cette conception de la vie « immortelle » en passe par un traitement du corps particulier, qu’il s’agit de surveiller et de traiter pour, in fine , espérer s’en passer (« mind uploading »). Sur ce point du traitement du corps comme machine, voire comme déchet, la clinique psychopathologique se révèle également féconde en précédents.
Public, visual displays, that aid in the mourning process and summon viewers into action, constitute a rhetorical hybrid that combines epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. This essay suggests a ...theory of collective mourning that seeks to explain the rhetorical import and function of these multimedia, public displays. The combination of form and content allows the critic to understand how the epideictic and deliberative function in this genre of discourse. After explaining the theory, a case study of the Silent Witness Project follows.
This article studies the importance of the loss of family ties and its symbolic burden in the narrative of homeless people in familistic societies. The family is the main reason why poverty does not ...directly lead to social exclusion in southern European countries. However, the economic crises of the last two decades have weakened the ability of the family to protect its members. The new forms of poverty that imply processes of individualized social exclusion that lead to homelessness in southern Europe can be understood as a consequence of the overload currently suffered by families in those countries due to the recent economic crises. The loss of family ties in this type of society is so stigmatizing that, even if the person is living on the street for structural reasons such as having been unemployed and having lost their home due to the effects of the recent economic crises and not receiving aid from social services, always reproduces a characteristic story of self-victimization and mourning for not having had a good family that has helped him in times of need.
